TRUST ME WHEN NIGHT FALLS 1

Author: xxxevilgrinxxx
Title: Trust Me – When Night Falls
Rating: NC17 Warning for character deaths, and killing, some gore
Fandom: Pitch Black/ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
Disclaimer: I do not own Pitch Black or any of its characters. I only own a part of this plot, and the rest I’m going to royally screw with, and that goes for the characters too. Lines are taken from the movie Pitch Black, and also from the script.
Pairing: Riddick/Shazza
Summary: A twist on Pitch Black. A what if sort of story…What if….Shazza survived instead?
Archive: vx, fdb

Feedback: In this thread only please. No shreds; I write for fun only

As a note, I have never been comfortable writing in the third person, so this has been difficult for me. Be kind, but please review, not so much for the spelling mistakes, argh, but impressions, and the like. I hate writing 3rd person, so it would be appreciated.

TRUST ME – WHEN NIGHT FALLS

One

They say most of your brain shuts down in cryo sleep. All but the primitive side. The animal side. No wonder I’m still awake.

Transporting me with civilians, sounded like forty, forty plus. Heard an Arab voice, some hoodoo holy man, probably on his way to New Mecca. But what route? What route?

Smell the woman; sweat, boots, tool belt, leather. Prospector type. Free settlers, and they only take the back roads.

And here’s my real problem. Mr. Johns. Blue eyed devil, planning on taking me back to Slam, only this time he picked a ghost lane. A long time between stops. A long time for something to go wrong….

—

“Why’d I fall on you?”

“He’s dead. Captain’s dead. Christ, I was looking right at him when…”

“I mean, I mean, chrono shows we’re twenty two weeks out, so gravity wasn’t supposed to kick in for another nineteen. I mean, I mean, I mean, why did I fall at all?”

“You hear me? Captain’s dead…”

“Something took a swipe at us…”

“So what, we should both go down too? Out of sheer fucking nobility?”

“Look, Fry. Company says we’re responsible for every one of those…”

“Company’s not here, is it?”

“I’m not going to die for them…”

—
He had been awake; in that strange cold place that cryo took him. He had listened as the docking pilot, Fry, had jettisoned section after section, only being stopped at the last moment by someone.

Someone now dead, after he drowned in his own blood on the floor of the crashed ship. The only other person that had known what she had done. That had known that she had threatened to kill all of them if it meant her own survival. ‘I’m not going to die for them.’

They all thought that she was the captain, and she didn’t seem all that eager to tell them that she wasn’t, but he had known. He had heard the whole thing, and had almost admired that she was willing to kill all of them, just to survive. It’s what he would have done, in a heartbeat. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do, no one he wouldn’t kill, if it meant he’d live through it.

He had been waiting all this time for something to go wrong, just one thing, and then everything had gone wrong at once. It was just a matter of figuring what to do from here on out, what choice to make.

The crash had killed nearly everyone. The trail of destruction, of scattered cargo containers, was miles long. It was amazing that anyone had survived at all. Captain or not, Fry was still a hell of a pilot for managing to put the last remaining section of the Hunter-Gratzner down in relatively one piece. She lay crumpled and broken against the unforgiving rock of Tangiers2, buried more than halfway, just the back bay doors able to open into the hard light of the strange planet.

Eleven had survived out of the forty or so passengers that had booked transport on the Hunter-Gratzner. With the exception of five cryo lockers, the passengers would have woken upon arrival on New Mecca. The captain, docking pilot and the navigator would awake shortly before arrival in the Helion system, so that the ship could be safely piloted to New Mecca. Johns would awake at the same time as the other three, so that he could ensure the safe transport of his prisoner. Leaving him, Riddick, whose cryo locker was under a special lockout procedure.

The crash had changed all of that. All but eleven dead in a swathe of destruction. He had thought the crash would kill him, and had thought, fleetingly, that it was a stupid, meaningless way to die. But he listened anyway, unable to be anything but what he was, a survivor.

He fought the strange half sleep of cryo and listened to the sound of the small clicks and tears, the whoosh of air as his cryo locker opened at being compromised by the twisting of what was left of the ship when it hit the planet’s surface.

The rest of the ship was a mangled wreck when he finally managed to work himself free, still staggering and weakened from the effects of cryo. ‘Fuck’, he had always hated traveling by cryo. He could never sleep, not really, but he never woke fully either, even when he was finally out of the locker. It always took him a few hours to shake it loose, a few hours where he was left vulnerable, a situation he hated. A situation he knew Johns would use to his full advantage if he could get a hold of him.

Blindfolded, bitted and restrained, he had no way of knowing whether Johns had managed to escape his own cryo locker or not. He doubted Johns was dead, if for no other reason that he knew he wouldn’t get that lucky. He also knew that Johns’ paranoia would ensure that he had a locker in plain sight of his at all times. The only way he knew that Johns wasn’t loose yet is because he was still free to move.

There was nothing nearby that he could use to cut his restraints and he needed time. Time where he could shake his torpor, assess the situation, and see how he could escape this too. Escape was what he was good at and he would escape this too, given enough time.

He was otherwise uninjured; his cryo locker was in the middle of the others, to ensure Johns could keep him under surveillance. The restraints within the locker itself had also served to keep him from being flung in the crash. He wasn’t cut or injured, not in any major way. He had a small cut on his shaven head, he could smell the blood, but there was nothing broken.

He was hungry, and had lost weight since being captured by Johns, who believed that starving him would make his two hundred and twenty pounds more manageable. He would need water. He would also need to get rid of the reinforced metal cuffs on his wrists and ankles, to say nothing of the horse bit in his mouth.

Even in the dim half-light of the ship, behind his blindfold, he could feel the intensity of the light, like a weight behind his eyes. His goggles were in one of his cargo pockets, and he would need to free his hands to reach those too, or the sun’s light would blind him, further weakening him and putting him at the mercy of Johns. Not a place he wanted to be.

It was, in the end, a matter of waiting. Johns had the keys to his restraints and, of everyone that had survived; he still believed Johns was the one that could kill him, if push came to shove. In the end, he knew that no matter what happened, he would probably have to kill Johns, if for no other reason than to get the things he needed to survive. And so he hid in a small space in the network of pipes and wires, to wait for Johns, and to listen to what went on around him, to see what he could use.

next…